Chances are you’ve heard that we’re using a lot of energy every day and need to, you know, slow our roll. We’ve done an excellent job figuring out how to use fossil fuels, but what about our other natural resources? Wind, some say, is our next best thing.

An infographic created by QuinStreet street below shows that in the last 62 years alone, our energy consumption has increased by 46 percent. Every home is using up more energy charging, lighting, and Internet browsing, that we need to start branching out for energy sources. The good news is, we have!

Since last year, we’ve upped our use of hydro, solar, and wind usage. But while solar powering is still a greentech favorite with nearly a 34 percent increase in usage, wind is creeping up there with a 16 percent increase.

And we’re not just talking far-off wind collectors that only provide energy for facilities willing to use it. Some, such as Oceana.com, believe the energy will trickle all the way down to machines used every day like our cars.

The U.S. Department of Energy current supports seven project sites for six-year-long off-shore wind “initiative.” If Congress allows it, each sit will be given up to $47 million over four years to work on wind energy. These projects are located in Austin, Tx.; Atlantic City, N.J.; Cleveland, Ohio; Seattle, Wash.; Stamford, Conn.; Monhegan Island, Maine.; and Virginia Beach, Va.

Check out the infographic for more on how wind energy has advanced:

Courtesy of: WorldWideLearn.com

Wind energy image via Shutterstock

Greentech startup Reel Solar has just alerted the SEC it’s raising a $4 million round of funding. The company doesn’t have a functional website and hasn’t announced any products, but we’re going way out on a limb and wildly guessing it has something to do with solar energy.

The full Form D is included below. Briefly, it states that the still-stealthy company is taking a round $4 million from green tech VC firm Nth Power, Vancouver-based Pangaea Ventures (an investor in a previous round), and Mayfield Fund, a Silicon Valley powerhouse.

Reel Solar is based in San Jose, Calif., and was founded in 2009. Its execs include founder Dori Gal (pictured), who previously worked at (and recruited other Reel Solar team members from) chipmaker KLA Tencor; Edward Grady, and Kurt Weiner. Former PG&E chef Peter Darbee is also a director, the filing states.

Read the full Form D below:

“Tonight, I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good,” the president said.

There has been some progress already, Obama said, saying that four years ago, other countries dominated the clean energy market — and the jobs that come with it. Just one example is Germany, which has invested heavily in solar energy and has succeeding in powering up to half the country at times in the past year.

That foreign leadership of greentech is starting to change.

“Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America,” Obama said.

President Obama

The technology industry has been leading the way. Google recently invested $200 million in a new wind energy project that brings the company’s total green power total to two gigawatts. Mobile rival Apple has also invested heavily in green energy, and CEO Tim Cook talked about its efforts today at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference

“I’m proud that we’re better at being environmentally friendly, and that we have the largest solar farm anywhere and can run our data center on renewable energy,” Cook said.

President Obama also wants to drive solar power, reduce the amount of power that is wasted by inefficient buildings.

Oil interests can take some comfort, perhaps in knowing that Obama also promised to “keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.”

Here’s the full text of Obama’s comments on greentech:

Four years ago, other countries dominated the clean energy market and the jobs that came with it.  We’ve begun to change that.  Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America.  So let’s generate even more.  Solar energy gets cheaper by the year – so let’s drive costs down even further.  As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.

In the meantime, the natural gas boom has led to cleaner power and greater energy independence.  That’s why my Administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits.  But I also want to work with this Congress to encourage the research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and water.

Indeed, much of our new-found energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together.  So tonight, I propose we use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an Energy Security Trust that will drive new research and technology to shift our cars and trucks off oil for good.  If a non-partisan coalition of CEOs and retired generals and admirals can get behind this idea, then so can we.  Let’s take their advice and free our families and businesses from the painful spikes in gas prices we’ve put up with for far too long.  I’m also issuing a new goal for America: let’s cut in half the energy wasted by our homes and businesses over the next twenty years.  The states with the best ideas to create jobs and lower energy bills by constructing more efficient buildings will receive federal support to help make it happen.

photo credits: andjohan via photopin cc, jmtimages via photopin cc

After decades of instability and uncertainty, the United States suddenly finds itself in a peculiar position: In the driver’s seat as a net-supplier of energy, potentially the world’s largest.

Driven entirely by the rapid progress of advanced energy technologies, oil and gas extraction is increasing; wind, solar and geothermal energy sources are booming; and energy efficiency is allowing us to do more and more with less energy.

For some, this is validation that the “old way” – oil and gas – are making a comeback; for others it’s about “clean” sources of energy reshaping our economy and protecting our environment.

The truth is that it’s not a zero sum game. Advancements in technology in all types of energy are leading to cleaner solutions, making the “clean vs. dirty” energy debate irrelevant to the opportunity that lies ahead. This technical synergy across the various energy markets is also leading to an accelerated transformation of the overall sector to advanced energy, which was a $1.1 trillion global market in 2011, making it larger than pharmaceutical manufacturing worldwide.

By focusing on making all forms of energy affordable, secure and clean, this technological revolution is succeeding because it provides an economic imperative that “clean” alone could never accomplish. Clean lacked the power of the invisible hand to align the incentives of the individual energy consumer with that of society’s energy needs. Advanced energy is different because it couples two important things: the ability to prosper and increase economic competitiveness while simultaneously improving the health and wellness of the United States.

Corporations embrace diverse energy sources

The retailer Kohl’s, the nation’s largest corporate solar panel owner, offers a good example of a large company that’s embraced advanced energy technologies for economic reasons. Kohl’s has made an effort to strategically diversify their energy mix, installing solar where there are strong renewable energy incentives on the books. Kohl’s has also implemented a range of energy efficiency programs, such as sophisticated lighting and energy management technologies, that deliver significant cost savings and emission reductions.

Intel and Google also actively deploy advanced energy technologies, including innovative energy-saving data center designs and an energy mix that features “traditional” energy sources, renewables and fuel cells.

General Electric, a long time supplier to the oil and gas industry, has similarly embraced an “all of the above” strategy in its product portfolio. In addition to its traditional offerings, GE now supplies a whole range of advanced energy products and services, including wind turbines, smart grid solutions, reciprocating engines that run on biogas, and some of the world’s largest and most efficient gas turbines, not to mention Energy Star appliances and LED light bulbs.

Advanced energy is a growth industry

It’s unlikely these successful companies would have embraced advanced energy so wholeheartedly if it offered no economic benefits.  Indeed, research indicates the United States as a whole is following suit:

• The U.S. advanced energy market reached $132 billion in 2011, representing nearly 12 percent of the global market. This market is expected to grow to an estimated $157 billion in 2012, with the U.S. share of the global market expected to rise to 15 percent.
• Patents for advanced energy related technologies granted to U.S entities in 2011 exceeded the 1,000 mark for the first time.
• Wind, solar, biomass, geothermal and hydropower projects accounted for 46.2 percent of new electrical generating capacity for the first ten months of 2012, a 47.7 percent increase over the level recorded for the same period in 2011.
• All this is occurring while oil and natural gas suppliers enjoy robust, and in some cases, record profits.

From a macroeconomic perspective, with global energy demand expected to grow 40 percent over the next few decades, the economic opportunity is so vast that the growth in new energy markets like solar, wind and geothermal doesn’t interfere with the ability of traditional oil and gas businesses to grow their markets. That is why you now see unlikely combinations – small, innovative start-ups working hand-in-hand with traditional legacy companies – because it ties together scale with science to create economic opportunity in all markets.

That’s also why you see industry leaders like Arno Harris, CEO of solar PV developer Recurrent Energy, arguing that “stability can be found in a portfolio of both renewables and gas [that offers] more predictable prices and greater energy security.”

Energy is not a zero-sum game anymore. So let’s end the polarizing focus on “clean vs. dirty” energy and focus on migrating to an advanced energy future. Let’s ensure that we continue to invest in technology to drive down the costs of using all of our domestic sources of energy and make them healthier for consumption.

With an advanced energy mindset, the United States can be both prosperous and healthy as a nation.

Hemant Taneja is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm focusing on early stage and growth equity investments. In addition, Taneja co-founded Advanced Energy Economy, a business organization focused on catalyzing regional energy innovation clusters across America. The creation of AEE is modeled after the work he did in founding the New England Clean Energy Council, which received an award from the Department of Energy. He is also an entrepreneur in his own right; before joining General Catalyst in 2002, Taneja was founder and CEO of a mobile software company that was acquired. He is a graduate of MIT.

Rooftop solar panel photo: Shutterstock

The nearly five million commercial and industrial facilities in the United States account for nearly half of all domestic energy consumption, at a cost of over $200 billion each year. But according to Chris Pacitti, general partner at venture capital firm Austin Ventures, only five percent of that market has adopted sophisticated energy management tools. Investors are taking notice.

Software-based cleantech like energy management software (EMS) is a fast-growing segment as interest in hardware-based cleantech wanes. Leading EMS vendors like C3 and Hara offer tools that allow organizations to measure their energy consumption and, often, identify operational inefficiencies. That can lead to savings in energy consumption as well as real dollars, a fact that’s attracting some business owners’ attention.

A Pike Research report estimates the EMS and services industry will grow to $5.5 billion by 2020, from just under $1 billion in 2011. That’s a compound annual growth rate of more than 20 percent.

An example of a recently-funded EMS vendor is Noesis, backed by Austin Ventures and Black Coral Capital. The company’s Web-based tools track energy consumption across more than 640 million square feet in nearly 7,500 buildings. Noesis’ facility portfolio has grown by 200 percent in the past four months.

Sarah Groen, co-founder and director of SURGE Accelerator, says that cleantech investments are shifting from hardware plays (think wind turbines) to software plays like EMS. So-called “digital cleantech” investments fit more squarely within VC’s comfort zone.

“After minimal success with hardware-focused cleantech investments, a software play gets [VCs] back to what they’re comfortable with–the VC model of the dot-com days,” explains Wal van Lierop, president and chief executive of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital.

Additionally, Groen says that hardware-based cleantech has received something of a “black eye” as companies like Solyndra have come to light, giving investors more confidence in funding EMS-based cleantech.

“These applications empower and incentivize both utilities and end customers to get more from their energy,” says Steve Vassallo, general partner at Foundation Capital. “Initial investments in cleantech were focused on the infrastructure, but the time has now come for the next wave of digital energy solutions and applications, of which energy management and technology-enabled conservation will play a substantial role.”

Vassallo further notes that “investing in efficiency is five times less [expensive] than investing in new [energy] supply.”

Several other factors are driving investor interest in EMS, specifically. “[Investing in EMS] is capital-light and may offer faster investment returns,” says van Lierop. In addition, customer demand is being spurred by new legislative mandates for reducing organizations’ energy consumption–which suggests lucrative long-term revenue potential for EMS vendors.

William Jaffray, an energy engineer at Associated Renewable, points out that many businesses are taking a hard look at their energy use for the first time. This stems from the desire to reduce consumption, lower energy costs, and address White House calls-to-action like the Green Button Initiative. “Good management software provides useful analysis of energy consumption and costs,” Jaffray says.

Juan Lois, financial analyst at Associated Renewable, adds, “The key to the accelerated growth of the industry is the fact that businesses and large corporations now have access to much more detailed and precise energy consumption reports. This allows them to reduce the variability of consumption–especially during peak demand times–reducing energy costs, maximizing efficiency, lowering operating costs, and increasing the value of the property.”

Vassallo is bullish on the long-term revenue potential for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) EMS vendors, particularly from utilities customers. “While utilities historically tilted toward capital-intensive enterprise software sales, the benefits of SaaS-based approaches are simply too good to ignore,” he says. “Utilities will absolutely gravitate toward Cloud-based, managed services.”

Tom Pincince, president and chief executive of Digital Lumens, believes the most promising long-term revenue models include solutions and services delivering continuous and ongoing operational efficiency. He says that “Simple reporting and monitoring will not deliver enough value; winners will be systems that drive changes in the way a building and its occupants use energy. Ultimately we’ll see new business models such as Light as a Service or HVAC as a Service.”

Economic and legislative forces are driving numerous changes within the energy management landscape. With the re-election of President Obama, there will likely be a continued emphasis on climate change, sustainability and energy independence. This gives investors a long-term opportunity for funding a market that will inevitably be expanding for quite some time.

Ashley M. Halligan is a 2007 graduate of Marietta College (Ohio) with a bachelors in journalism. She has a background in freelance feature writing–in particular, travel, musician and human interest features. She is a market analyst at Software Advice, where she regularly reports on sustainability news and trends along with trends in the nonprofit sector. Connect with her on Google+ or follow her Contemporary Pilgrim book project.

Top image: Energy history screen from Nest’s iPhone app.

AutoGrid, a Bay Area-based startup founded in 2011, pulled in $9 million to further the development of its software to help utilities and businesses control their energy usage.

Its technology works by analyzing data collected by smart meters to allow operators to adjust to meet supply and demand. Its major customers include the City of Palo Alto Utilities and Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and it is reaching out to municipalities on the East Coast.

The data is collected from smart meters through sensors that are placed on the electric grid. By incorporating machine learning, which gets smarter over time, it can make predictions about energy consumption patterns inside buildings and across service regions. When enough data has been processed, it can forecast how much electricity might be needed in the coming hours or days.

“The capacity of the [smart] grid is not deployed efficiently,” said founder and chief executive, Dr. Amit Narayan (pictured, left). Smartgrids are the computer-based remote control and automation mechanisms that are used today to deliver electricity. In the past, workers had to manually gather data by reading meters and measuring voltage, and keeping an eye out for flawed equipment.

With the advent of analytics tools, we can begin to make predictions about the future and further optimize energy usage. “Up to 20 percent of the power-generating assets in some regions only get deployed ten or fewer days a year,” said Dr. Narayan.

Prior to founding AutoGrid, he taught on the topic of electronic design automation software at Berkeley and Stanford. He founded Berkeley Design Automation, which is used by more than 20 of the top 25 chip developers.

“AutoGrid is creating the brains for the smart grid. If you can analyze all of the data, you can predict what the electrical parameters of the grid will be under any situation and use that to remove inefficiencies from the electricity supply chain.” said Dan Ahn, managing director at Voyager Capital in a statement.

What’s interesting from a competitive standpoint is the company’s focus on pattern-recognition and predictive analysis. It faces competition from Enernoc, a real-time energy-management tool, and Silver Spring Networks, an energy networking supplier that is used by over 15 utilities across the U.S.

The company’s investors include Foundation Capital,  Voyager Capital and Stanford University. Last year, it won a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy program to devote to improving the product.

Image via Shutterstock

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Between 2006 and 2007, cleantech and greentech emerged as hot terms in the investor vernacular. Startups focused on big-picture energy needs, including solar and wind power, pulled in huge investments, thanks in part to the rising price of oil. Government initiatives, along with venture capital, helped these companies grow quickly.

“Most of the investments were in energy production, focusing on increasing energy supply,” said Physic Ventures partner Andrew Williamson in an interview with VentureBeat. “These were capital-intensive investments in mostly solar, wind power, and biofuel commercial and industrial startups.”

But the demand for revolutionary energy technology startups has fizzled in the last few years. Solar production moved to China, and lower costs undermined United States manufacturing. The 2008 economic collapse hurt many industries, including greentech. After the famous Solyndra bankruptcy in Fall 2011, public opinion of solar and other large-scale energy technology slumped and new companies in the field have struggled to raise capital.

“The solar space as a whole is so depressed and troubled,” Pangaea Ventures partner Keith Gillard told VentureBeat.

Less solar, more consumer-focused tech

Since the 2008 recession, venture capital firms have refocused their funds away from solar and onto different areas of greentech. Physic Ventures has found success investing in consumer-focused green technology startups, as well as startups applying green principles to already viable technologies, such as cloud, mobile, and social.

Startups that take the latter approach have gained VC firms’ attention because their more-familiar business models can set them up for successful exits, says Williamson.

Business-to-consumer startups that focus on sustainable living, recycling, and collaborative consumption have also done well. Recycle Bank, which rewards people for doing green activities, and Energy Hub, a startup using cloud tech to manage home energy usage, are two examples of Physic-backed startups applying greentech issues to current technology.

Electric vehicle investments have remain steady

While solar and wind energy funding activity has slowed down, electric vehicle investments have remained steady throughout the years.

“If you can have an electric vehicle where people don’t have range anxiety, the ultimate market impact will be enormous. There is a particular value for EV startups, because there is urgency and pressure in the market,” says Gillard.

In addition, startups developing longer-range batteries for electric vehicles have done well in raising capital, as well as generating revenue. People want electric cars that can travel as far as the gasoline-powered variety, and that means car makers need better batteries. Pangaea Ventures has invested in two battery and energy storage companies, Envia and CNano.

Greentech funding will go on

Even though it has slowed down, greentech funding isn’t dying. Goldman Sachs announced a $40 billion fund for greentech investments, mostly earmarked for overseas energy companies. A few solar companies are still doing fine, too. Nanosolar, a company that prints ultra-thin solar cells on aluminum foil, recently closed a $70 million round.

But many of the big-name VC firms that invested in greentech several years ago have scaled back their efforts. Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, which once threw a lot of money at greentech startups, wouldn’t comment on the current state of its green investments for this article. However, KPCB still hands its hands in the game. For instance, the firm invested in alternative home electricity company Gen110 and electric-car charging company Coloumb Technologies in May, 2011.

Khosla Ventures, another leader in greentech investments, recently put its funds toward energy storage startup Liquid Metal Battery Corp. And in early June, it also invested in Climate Corp, a company that insures farmers against climate-change weather problems that can destroy crops.

While investors see the value in renewable energy, many have preferred to place their bets on more sure short-term payoffs in the social and cloud spaces. It’s hard to argue with lucrative exits like Success Factors or viral hits like Pinterest.

But in the wake of Facebook’s troubled IPO, it’s possible that the “easy money” won’t seem quite so easy any more. That might lead more investors to put their money into greentech companies that promise sustainable growth even without a viral network effect.

Green car on cash image via Shutterstock

The deal is not specifically a clean-technology play because it is focused on improving the efficiency of transmitting power from oil- and other fossil-fuel-based power generation methods. Companies like GE have had to rely on less conventional sources for oil and other fossil fuels, so there’s a lot of potential to save power companies money by improving the amount of energy it can ship from one place to the next without losing any.

Converteam, for example, manufactures power drivers for low- and medium-voltage power sources — which convert electricity into some kind of mechanical energy, like a turbine or a motor. That’s only a small part of Converteam’s massive portfolio, which is why GE was willing to pay $3.2 billion for the company, said Steve Minnihan, an analyst with clean technology firm Lux Research.

“They can help smooth out the small imbalances and a lot of the unhealthy levels of reactive power that come out of a solar farm,” he said. “GE stressed the importance of this acquisition for its oil and gas sector, but looking beyond that, it can work for wind turbines and solar panels too.”

That’s because most researchers and companies have already figured out how to pick up energy from renewable sources like solar and wind power, said Matt Feinstein, an analyst with Lux Research. There’s still a lot of room to improve the efficiency of energy capture devices like the photovoltaic cells in solar panels — but the most commercial opportunity lies in actually getting that energy to consumers.

“You can look at GE overall being an energy player, look at renewables and we’ve mostly figured out how to get energy from renewables.” he said. ”We’ve got all the sources of energy, we’re not harnessing new things, it’s about the management and the more efficient harnessing.”

That’s because having all those devices connected to a network will make it easier to run any number of aspects of life that have an impact on the environment more efficiently. That can range from power grids, to traffic or to fuel efficiency. The biggest opportunity lies in placing all those devices on a smart grid — a highly efficient power grid that uses advanced programs and wirelessly connected devices to distribute power without wasting it. Vestberg made the comments at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla.

“In the next 5 years, we expect two-thirds of all electronics will have some connectivity in them,” Vestberg said. “That means we can use a much more powerful grid in our society and reduce our impact on the environment drastically.”

There’s also a holistic opportunity to reduce the impact that other connected devices — such as vehicles — have on the environment, he said. One way would be to give drivers the ability to “download” more horsepower to their vehicles when they need it, like when they are going on a long trip or going up a hill. If they don’t require it, the car automatically restricts that horsepower — increasing fuel efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.

“We can increase safety and improve (carbon) emissions by steering cars and keep those wasteful habits in check,” he said. “That’s another industry that can benefit from what we have built.”

That’s quite a potential impact, too — the average American spends around 45 hours in a car each month, Vestberg said. There are also around 250 million registered vehicles in the United States, and many of them don’t meet emission standards and are not very environmentally friendly or fuel-efficient.

There’s a huge opportunity in expanding the “Internet of Things,” a short-hand way of describing a massive wireless network where most electronics and devices are connected to the Internet. For every tenth of a percent increase in broadband penetration across a country, it’s sustainable gross domestic product — a measure of a country’s output — increases by around 1 percent. Every 1,000 new broadband connections, whether they are mobile or fixed, also creates another 80 jobs, Vestberg said.

That means that there’s a huge untapped market in the United States alone. There are entire sections of rural America that don’t have access to broadband, and coverage is pretty weak in some parts of the country. Connecting all those remote and weakly covered areas would add another 10 million jobs in the United States — which is pretty significant given that the unemployment rate still remains high at 8.9 percent.

The wireless industry accounts for around 2 percent of all carbon emissions today, Vestberg said. There are around 1 billion mobile broadband users today, and that number should go up to around 5 billion broadband users by 2016, Vestberg said. Around 85 percent of the planet has mobile coverage, and it will reach around 90 percent in 5 years — with around 8 billion active mobile subscriptions, up from 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions today.

“For the ones good in math, there’s not that many people on the planet,” Vestberg said. “People are going to have several devices with so many different types of descriptions, and anything that benefits from being connected will be connected.”

Cleantech has become an increasingly important part of innovation in Silicon Valley. GreenBeat 2010 is a two-day conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. discussing the newest advancements and technology in green technology.

Check out VentureBeat for coverage of GreenBeat 2010 from VentureBeat’s lead GreenBeat writer Iris Kuo, as well as the rest of the team. We’re covering topics ranging from electric cars, to smart energy grids, to even energy-efficient buildings. You can also find the latest list of GreenBeat 2010 speakers here.

You can see Marshall and Ha’s comments in a video below:

The investments range from cleantech to cloud computing and semiconductors — all areas Intel is probably beginning to branch out into, since the company is hoping to put chips in just about everything in existence. The announcements are timed to the Intel Developer Forum, which started yesterday with a keynote speech by Intel chief executive Paul Otellini (pictured).

The four companies receiving funding include: Provo, Utah-based Adaptive Computing — which provides cloud-computing and data-center software; Santa Clara-based Ciranova, a chip designer; San Francisco-based Joyent, a provider of cloud computing infrastructure that Intel Capital had formerly invested in; and San Francisco-based Nexant, which provides software to help with energy efficiency and clean energy solutions. Joyent received $15 million of the funding round, while the rest was undisclosed.

The funding comes as part of the $3.5 billion effort launched in February by multiple venture capital firms led by Intel Capital to help provide jobs for college graduates interested in working in the tech field.

Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than $9.5 billion in more than 1,050 companies — located in 47 countries.